The whole megillah about Purim

In a recent conversation, my friend Danny Freedman told me that he was surprised to learn that the Book of Esther was a fairly short work.

He had heard, of course, of the expression “the whole megillah,” which implies that the book — one of five megillahs (or megillot), Hebrew for scroll, in the bible along with Lamentations, Ruth, Song of Songs and Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) — is long and tedious.

Flickr/Rahel Jaskow

Since the Megillah of Esther is read tonight and tomorrow for the holiday of Purim, this is a very timely question indeed.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression is slang, alluding to the length of the megillah. “A long, tedious, or complicated story; freq. in a whole Megillah [after Yiddish a gantse megile] . Also the whole Megillah: the whole business, the whole thing. Freq. without capital initial,” the dictionary continues.

The earliest reference the OED finds is to “an elaborate megillah” referenced in a 1943 memo. It took another 11 years for the next reference — “Frana slipped her coat off and began to remove her sweaters. ‘Oh, come on, Frana. Not the whole megilleh.’” — to surface.

The Yiddish expression, according to the dictionary, was first recorded in 1957 at the Chicago Jewish Forum, interestingly enough in reference to a “gantse Megillah or ‘a whole Megillah’ [which had] been thrown around by a number of TV personalities ‥. presumably with little idea of the origin of the phrase.”

The OED cites several other references, and others are recorded in a great article on World Wide Words. According to that article, the megillah narrative “wanders at great length through vast amounts of detail and it can be a bit of a trial to sit through it all,” so it’s to be expected that the phrase “came to be a wry term for an overly extended explanation or story, or for something tediously complicated, or an involved situation or state of affairs.”

World Wide Words also addresses Frank Sinatra’s Come Blow Your Horn (1963), which featured the lyrics, “The taller the tree is — the sweeter the peach / I’ll give you the whole magilla — in a one word speech — reach.”

Sinatra and OED references aside, it’s worth noting that the phrase actually comes from the megillah itself, particularly Esther 9: 29-32, which tell of Esther and Mordecai’s exhaustive historical documentation of the events of the Purim narrative in a letter (Hebrew igeret, which is why many Orthodox Jews unravel the entire megillah scroll before reading it and fold it up as if they were reading correspondence they were seeing for the first time, as in the photo above), a megillah.

Esther can thus be said to have written the whole megillah.

Speaking as someone whose bar mitzvah portion was one of the longest configurations (a double portion, with an extra holiday addition) that is ever read on a Saturday, I found reading the megillah in synagogue (which I did more than a dozen times) was far easier and quicker than reading many of the weekly portions. The megillah — despite the expression — is really not that long.

It’s definitely an intense story, but the whole megillah about the megillah, is that it’s really not that long a megillah.